“I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity. Daniel Smith’s
anxiety is matched by a wonderful sense of the comic, and it is this which makes Monkey Mind not only a dark, pain-filled
book but a hilariously funny one, too. I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.”—Oliver Sacks, bestselling author of The Mind’s Eye and Musicophilia

“Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for
depression.”—Aaron T. Beck, father of cognitive therapy

“I don’t know Daniel Smith, but I do want to give him a hug. His book is so bracingly
honest, so hilarious, so sharp, it’s clear there’s one thing he doesn’t have to be anxious about:
Whether or not he’s a great writer.”—A.J. Jacobs, author of Drop Dead Healthy and The Year of Living Biblically

“You don’t need a Jewish mother, or a profound sweating problem, to feel Daniel Smith’s
pain in Monkey Mind. His memoir treats what must be the essential ailment of our time — anxiety — and it does so
with wisdom, honesty, and the kind of belly laughs that can only come from troubles transformed.”—Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

“Daniel Smith has written a wise, funny book, a great mix of startling memoir and fascinating
medical and literary history, all of it delivered with humor and a true generosity of spirit. I only got anxious in the last
part, when I worried the book would end. Of course, it did, but Smith’s hopeful last chapters helped me cope.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and The Ask

“As a fellow sufferer, I balked at reading Monkey Mind, fearful that a book about anxiety
might send me over the edge. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Daniel Smith maps the jagged contours of anxiety with such insight,
humor, and compassion that the result is, oddly, calming. There are countless gems in these pages, including a fresh take on the
psychopathology of chronic nail biting, an ill-fated ménage a trois—and the funniest perspiration scene since Albert Brooks’
sweaty performance in Broadcast News. Read this book. You have nothing to lose but your heart palpitations, and your Xanax
habit.”—Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss and Man Seeks God

Steve Jobs: Anti-Anxious God

Via the inimitable Mike Daisey — whose really remarkable show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is opening at the Public Theater next week (if you live in New York, do yourself a favor and go see it) — comes this bit of wisdom from Steve Jobs: ‎“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”

Jobs made this remark during a commencement address he delivered at Stanford in 2005. A year earlier — as the world knows — he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and given 3-to-6 months to live. The doctors soon revised the prognosis, and of course he held on for another seven years, but for a little while there he had to sit with the knowledge that it was soon going to be over. That’s it. Poof: The End is Nigh. And the point Jobs makes in his Stanford speech is that those hours of having to face his mortality, I mean really face it, merely made concrete the creed by which he had alwayslived his life — the creed that Daisey posted just minutes after Jobs died.

Now: what Jobs said to those Stanford seniors wasn’t very original. “Live every day as if it were your last” is one of the hoariest commencement clichés in the book, and actually a kind of oppressive thing to say to twenty-one-year-olds who are about to go off and get desperately drunk. (I always find it a little shitty and mean when commencement speakers beat kids over the head with impossible goals and Polonius-like ideals. Where’s the commencement speaker who will admit to spending four days in his underwear eating Costco-brand cashews and Diet Dr. Pepper? Call me, Princeton!) But the very amazing and awe-inspiring and scary thing about Steve Jobs meting out this advice is … he actually appears to mean it.

That is, he actually appears to have woken up most days of his life and taken the broadest possible existential perspective. He actually appears to have been one of those rare people who kept his own death — and the death of everything, the passing of everything — firmly in mind, so that he could move from morning to night without fear.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t do this everyday. He even implies, in his Stanford speech, that he didn’t do it everyday. But he did it a lot, and from this — what to call it? this apocalyptic nerve, this acute awareness that we’re only going around once so you might as well make it count — from this came … everything. All his accomplishments. All the innovations, all the creativity, all the success. Everything he packed into his 56 years.

This is incredible to me. It’s stunning. To me, Jobs represents a photographic negative of the anxious life, since anxiety is essentially a condition in which the sort of global perspective he upheld is totally, horrifyingly eclipsed by whatever cloud of petty concerns happens to be hovering around your head that day. To me, Jobs will always be a kind of anti-anxious god.